Death Valley Redux – Pt. 1
I made another trip to Death Valley National Park last weekend. I tried to concentrate more on shooting different subjects, places, and with different techniques. I put in over 170 miles on back country (offroad/dirt) roads, but that’s another story. I will be focusing on the photography aspects of the trip over the next few posts rather than the trip itself.
It had rained a torrential amount right before my last trip to Death Valley causing roads to be closed and some of the places of interest were unaccessible. Badwater was flooded and the Racetrack Playa was underwater. This time, both were in great shape and I got the opportunity to take the shots I wanted.
The Racetrack Playa was in great shape, but it was WINDY!! A couple of times, I had to kneel down in order to not be blown over and walking was an experience in careful foot placement just to keep my balance. The photography lesson was that I had to have some great tripod technique to get the images I envisioned. This includes spreading the legs of the tripod out rather than shortening them in order to get the low angel shots I was trying to capture.
Later in the trip I traveled to Badwater, the lowest place on the continent. Again, I was trying to capture HDR images. I think this location was better suited to HDR because of the white salt and the darker mountains.
My photographic goal was to capture HDR images of the rock tracks on the playa with the mountains in the background. I used matrix metering and three frame bracket bursts at the Racetrack and five frame bursts at Badwater all spaced at a stop apart to capture the range of light I was seeing. The Nikon D300 has a great feature that allows you to quickly set up your shots in 3. 5, or 7 shot brackets and to determine the amount of exposure difference in each frame.
I exported the images from Lightroom to Photomatix Pro to process the images using the tone mapping ability of the software to try to keep the images as close to natural as possible.
Below are three of the HDR images from the Racetrack Playa. You can click here to see all of my Death Valley images.
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- Death Valley Ractrack HDR – 1
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- Death Valley Ractrack HDR – 2
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- Death Valley Ractrack HDR – 3
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- Death Valley Badwater HDR – 1
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- Death Valley Badwater HDR – 2
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- Death Valley Badwater HDR – 3
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- Death Valley Badwater HDR – 4
Please leave a comment and let me know what you think or if you have any questions.
Tags: Death Valley, HDR, Images, Photography